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Nineteenth Century watercolours showing a bizarre but beautiful horse race between death and the devil THE DEVILS STEEPLECHASE The Celebrated Steeple Chase between his Satanic Majesty and the King of Terrors. n.p. n.d. [1830-post 1837] Oblong Imperial Octavo. (183x270mm). Contemporary brick red half-calf, recently rebacked, marbled boards. Rubbing to edges, some scuffing to the boards and bumping to the corners, otherwise in very good condition. Some browning and marking internally. Two leaves removed at some point in its history, one leaf has a short clean tear which does not affect the image; another has become detached. Twentyeight leaves. The first seventeen leaves contain ten pages (a “Title page” and nine paginated pages) of manuscript text with the title The Celebrated Steeple Chase between his Satanic Majesty and the King of Terrors and nine full page watercolours illustrating the story. The rest of the book contains three full page watercolours on a riding or racing theme. There is a half page watercolour and a coloured sketch on a military theme and there are ten unfinished pen and ink sketches and silhouettes (mainly on military or equestrian themes) at the beginning and end of the book including on the endpapers. The book also includes, in manuscript over four and a half pages, “The Tragedy” from The Ingoldsby Legends which tells the story of Catherine of Cleves. In places this has the look and feel of a commonplace or sketchbook but the story of the Steeplechase between the Devil and Death (the latter represented
as a skeleton) which forms the bulk of the book is attractively presented with beautiful, high quality water-colours. This extraordinary and apparently unique book has no author’s name and the illustrations are unsigned. The only clues about the dates are on the first, “title” page of the Steeplechase which states that the race is “to be run on the 12th March 1830 over a sporting
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country - distance to be about 4 miles from point to point”. The other clue is the poem from the Ingoldsby Legends which was first published in 1837 but as this comes after the Steeplechase in the book it is possible that there was a long gap between the two pieces. The date of the race illustrated in the Steeplechase is, interestingly, only four days after what is usually described as the first English National